It’s Time To Hire a Real Tech Team for Your Startup

These days, you can get pretty far without experienced help, but the fall can be dramatic

Hiring experienced technical help is one of the most important and most expensive decisions a startup founder is ever going to make. The problem is, most startups bring on dedicated tech resources either too early or too late, and in either case, the results are usually disastrous. So how do you know when the time is right to take such a huge risk?

I’m currently building Teaching Startup, a tech-based product with a self-imposed rule of using only no-code tools — and it has very quickly become a revenue-generating product that already has tons of customers. On the other hand, I’m also head of product at a startup with the best tech team I’ve ever worked with.

I love no-code. I love minimum viable products (MVP). I love getting maximum value for minimal effort. But I’m also a former developer, so I know the pain of limping along to product-market fit then and spending hours every day working around the product’s shortcomings, especially on the administrative end.

The simple truth is this: Hiring a technical co-founder, a CTO, a genius coder or an outside development firm will not magically solve all of your technical needs. In fact, more often than not, bringing in experienced help often adds additional complexity.

But if you don’t bring in experts at some point, your hacked-together tech is going to fall over under the weight of its own success. Right?

Maybe. Here are the seven reasons that will convince me to take the plunge and hire real developers to build real software and robust business tools.

You’re making money

I’m a big detractor against professionally coding an idea that has no hard evidence it will return a profit, let alone runway-sustaining profit down the road. At the very least, you should have an MVP that’s generating income and poised for growth.

But once sustainable revenue starts coming in, your job as the visionary has to become selling the vision to your employees, your customers and your investors. When the time you spend building what you envision is…